This course starts with a review of atomic physics. The only atom for which the Schrödinger equation can be solved exactly is hydrogen. For all multi-electron atoms, some approximation must be made. Here we discuss the simplest approximation where the multi-electron wave functions are antisymmetrized products of hydrogen-like wave functions.

Reading
Read the Review of atomic physics online. These notes assume that you are familiar with the quantum mechanical description of the hydrogen atom. Other sources that describe this material are:

• Review of the hydrogen atom: Demtröder - Das Wasserstoffatom or the chapter, 'Quantum Mechanics of the Hydrogen Atom' in The Physics of Atoms and Quanta (Atom- und Quantenphysik) by Haken and Wolf.
• Many electron atoms (Mehrelektronatome) in The Physics of Atoms and Quanta (Atom- und Quantenphysik) by Haken and Wolf or the chapter 'The many-electron problem' (Das Mehrelektronenproblem der Molekülphysik und Quantenchemie) in Molecular Physics & Elementary of Quantum Chemistry (Molekülphysik und Quantenchemie) by Haken and Wolf.

For the exam you should $\cdots$
• be familar with the atomic orbitals.
• be able to explain the Born-Oppenheimer approximation.
• be able to write down the many-electron Hamiltonian for any atom.
• be able to approximate the many-electron Hamiltonian in terms of a sum of atomic-orbital Hamiltonians.
• be able to explain why ignoring the electron-electron interactions makes solving the many-electron problem much easier.
• be able to construct an approximate multi-electron wave functions of any atom as antisymmetrized products of atomic orbitals.
• be able to explain what the exchange energy is.
• be able to evaluate the energy of a trial wavefunction (a guess) in any Hamiltonian.

Student presentations
• A Matlab program to calculate the time evolution of an N electron atom. The program is not long but since the problem is intractable it requires enormous computer resources to run.
• Grundzustand und erster angeregter Zustand des Heliumatoms, Manuel Zingl, 2010

Resources
Handbook of Basic Atomic Spectroscopic Data (NIST)